When Donna Marks’ union went on strike in 2021, she split her time during those 43 days between the picket line, driving DoorDash, fulfilling InstaCart orders, caring for her aging mother and visiting her daughter in the hospital.
It was not, Marks emphasizes, a vacation.
“Striking is a very dramatic change in a life,” Marks told The Skanner. “Your healthcare ends, your income ends. Most people live week by week. We’re not eligible for unemployment, because unemployment says we volunteered to go on strike. We’re part of a union, and if the majority of people are voting to strike, we have to stick with the union. Why are we getting punished for standing up for our rights?”
Marks has belonged to BCTGM Local 364, a union representing baking and confectionery workers, for 34 years. She believes that a new state bill that would allow striking workers to collect unemployment benefits during labor disputes would have led to a quicker, better outcome in negotiations with Nabisco, where she has worked for two decades.
“Mind you, unemployment is not our whole check – it’s just a small part of it,” Marks said. “But it would have been enough to help us, and it would have put the company in a position to not starve us out. And we would have probably come into negotiations a lot faster, and we probably wouldn’t have voted on that contract.”
Labor advocates will continue testifying this week in support of Senate Bill 916. On Thursday, the Oregon Senate Committee on Labor and Business heard testimony from Marks and others, including state Rep. Dacia Grayber (D-Portland), a union firefighter.
“In the event of exercising their legal right to a strike – based on legitimate grievances that are, and I emphasize, no fault of their own – these workers have effectively lost their jobs,” Grayber testified.
“(SB 916) seeks to treat striking workers like all workers seeking UI, including a seven-day waiting period, partial wage replacement and a cap on benefits. This bill is absolutely not about replacing the wages workers would normally make at their job. It’s asking that they receive enough to continue to make ends meet as the contract is worked out.”
Crunching Numbers
Committee member Rep. Cedric Hayden (R-Fall Creek) pushed back throughout the session, voicing concerns that small business owners would be negatively impacted by what he saw as an inevitable uptick in strikes and related unemployment benefit claims.
Lindsi Leahy, Unemployment Insurance Division director at the Oregon Employment Department, stated that according to her agency’s projections based on past strike activity, providing unemployment benefits to striking workers would have a negligible impact on employers. Clarifying that her agency took no position on the bill, Leahy reported that the projected cost of claims was $5.3 million annually and would not require hiring additional staff.
“For context, in calendar year 2023-24 we paid out over $1.5 billion in benefits,” Leahy said. “So $5.3 million is a relatively small amount. It has an impact, but it’s a small percentage.”
Cynthia Branger-Munoz, speaking on behalf of the Oregon Education Association, countered criticism that teachers’ strikes would drain the unemployment trust fund if SB 916 were to pass.
“Over the last 20 years, OEA has negotiated approximately 1,700 contracts,” Branger-Munoz said. “Since 2000, there have been only eight strikes, demonstrating how rare education strikes are.
Less than 0.5% of all negotiations have resulted in a strike. If SB 916 had been in place, those eight strikes since 2000 would have resulted in just nine weeks of unemployment eligibility statewide. To put this into perspective, this equates to less than one week of eligibility every two years.”
She added, “Because school districts budget for teacher salaries as part of their annual financial planning, the provision of UI benefits during a strike would not represent any additional financial burden, unless substitute workers were hired in place of striking staff.”
Supporters of SB 916 note corporations themselves already have the resources to drag strikes out, and that providing striking workers a buffer to sustain them could mitigate the practice of “starving out,” or waiting for union members to end the strike out of desperation.
Worker Visibility
When Marks and her coworkers went on strike, it wasn’t to demand raises or better benefits, she said – it was to hold on to what they had earned through previous bargaining, like better health insurance in lieu of raises.
“We were so afraid because we were used to good business practices with Kraft, where we got what we asked for. (Mondelez) wanted to take so much, and so we just said, leave everything the same.”
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